Alliance for Patient Safety

Zilli Amir:

I am advocate Zilli Amir and I am representing here the position of the "Tort Forum" of the Bar Association.

The Chairperson, Karin Elharar:

What is your position?

Zilli Amir:

Our position is; and we also submitted a position paper to the committee about it; that the system is sick with cover – ups and concealments. I want a moment to take five steps backwards away from the complaints commission; the matter of medical record. The medical record in Israel; anyone who deals with it, whether it is patients who receive a medical record, whether it is lawyers to whom people arrive and they are trying now to locate the medical record; the medical records are whitewashed, full of concealments, full of, I don't want to say forgeries, but we have seen that as well. Mr. Taub held here, in the previous discussion, three summaries of a discharge from surgery each one with a different content, with brazen concealment, terrible, of what had happened there, being typed at the time that everyone that had been present at the surgery knew well what had happened and nobody here fell off his chair.

Amiad Taub:

And it is also not error – prone.

Zilli Amir:

If only because of this, all of us must to fall off our chairs; and that's before we have even talked about the investigation committees and the quality control committee and the Complaints Ombudsman, is the issue of the medical records. Now, we are talking about legislation. An amazing law had been legislated 21 years ago in Israel, the Patients’ Rights Act, which takes into account and makes balances between the patient's rights, between the rights to autonomy, between the rights for information. We are talking here about concealment of information which relates to a person's body, to the most basic rights of the patient to receive the information. I liked very much to hear the representative of the Israel Medical Association and I see it in the declaration of the association; there is a declaration in which the physician undertakes to convey the whole information.

The Chairperson, Karin Elharar:

But there is no conflict, Madam.

Zilli Amir:

What we do not emphasize, we are talking about some other legislation, some kind of a new legislation. There is a law; there is law which is a dead character. Clause 21 of the investigation committees in the Patient Rights Act and it is not acted upon or enforced. If we look at the report done in 2004 and on the very thorough report of the State Comptroller in 2012, a report made public in 2015 which states and repeats; nothing has been done here about this data and we are talking about statistics which are crazy statistics. I can attest that out of 100 people arriving to see me, maybe one has applied to the Complaints Ombudsman. Thus, this one complaint reflects the 11,000 complaints that there are in the system, and they as well, look at the statistics of the result; it can't be. It is simply an unreasonable thing.

The Chairperson, Karin Elharar:

Do you have a position?

Zilli Amir:

The position is —

The Chairperson, Karin Elharar:

Madam, you didn't hear the question; do you have a position concerning the question whether the commission should be, in or out?

Zilli Amir:

Unequivocally it should be out; the best reason is because it is in right now. For decades it is in and we see the situation. This situation speaks for itself.

And one more word, definitely the last. Of course no one objects to it that a physician could apologize, and no one, I think, is looking here for guilty people. However it cannot be on account of the basic right to get information and it is an unconditional right. It cannot be conditioned on anything. It cannot be conditioned on immunity; it cannot be conditioned on protection. It is the right of the patient to know.